


Fool's Gold

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Depressed Sam Winchester, F/M, Fairies, Gabriel won't be around for a while, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Lily and her girlfriend are also there, M/M, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale, Sam Winchester's Demonic Powers, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, as well as some of Azazel's other special kids, but pre everything else, but there because Spn needs more LGBT people, not really relevant to the plot, pov switching, trans woman Jess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-16 05:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8088181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “I’m offering you and your brother a way out of here.  All you have to do is say yes.  There’s the teensy little price of your soul, but I promise I’ll take better care of it than those idiots up there.”
“Yes,” Adam said, the word strange and foreign in his ears, and the universe shattered.
Aka the one where Adam sells his soul to the fairy folk in return for getting him and Sam out of the Cage.  The time travel is an unexpected bonus.





	1. At the Crossroads

Adam knew he was going mad. He’d long since stopped trying to count the days; every one of them was the same. Lucifer and Michael raged at each other, great rings of fire with eyes like supernovas and wings that stretched across eternity, colliding and fighting with the force of a thousand earthquakes. They clawed equally at the boundaries of the cage and each other, never pausing for a moment’s rest. Their forms filled the cage with blinding light and deafening sound – for the first few years, Adam had spent his time mostly in darkness and silence interspersed with the swift agony of having his eyes burned up and his eardrums blown out every time his body repaired itself. Eventually, he supposed, he must have built up something like immunity. In later years, he could look right at the feuding archangels, and though it hurt like looking into the sun his vision remained intact.

When Lucifer and Michael got bored of each other, they would turn to their human charges. Lucky for Adam, Sam was a stubborn son of a bitch who drew their attention every time. Adam didn’t know how Sam still even had the self-awareness to draw their attention away from his little fuck-up of a half-brother, but every time without fail, when those terrible eyes turned on the human souls sharing their cage, Sam managed to muster up the energy to snarl and scream at them. He’d lost human words ages ago, but Adam thought he might have replaced English with Enochian. Adam couldn’t be sure. He never spoke anything in any language anymore.

At that particular moment, Lucifer and Michael were united in the only game they ever played together: see who could make Sam scream the loudest. Their methods of torture were endlessly inventive, helped along by the fact that Sam’s body always repaired itself no matter how they maimed it. They could dig out his eyes, pluck the skin from his body an inch at a time, drag his intestines out through his belly button and shove them back down his throat to choke on his own guts, and still the magic of the cage fixed it for the Archangels to play with over and over again. If Adam was going mad, surely Sam must have hit madness a long time ago.

Blood dripped down from above, mingled with bits of shredded grace and feathers that burned with ice or fire depending on who they’d been torn off of. The cage floor was always slick with blood and the ugly detritus of archangels at endless war.

That day Adam knew his mind had truly deserted him when something new finally happened. While Lucifer and Michael entertained themselves above him, a strange small creature snuck through a shimmering crack that appeared next to Adam. Adam watched it silently. It smiled at him, which only further confirmed Adam’s belief that it wasn’t real. Nothing real ever smiled in the cage, not unless it was Lucifer and Michael listening to Sam’s screaming and begging.

“What have we here?” the strange creature asked. Adam watched it, not daring to speak even to a hallucination. It was inevitable that with all of eternity, eventually the archangels would get tired of their Winchester and notice Adam one day. He wasn’t eager to hurry that day along. The creature regarded Adam, seemingly oblivious to the chaos and torture occurring above him. “Where _are_ my manners?” it asked, a twinkle in its eyes. “My name is hardly something I’m going to hand out to mortals, but you can call me Puck. I already know who you are, Adam Milligan.” Of course a hallucination would know the name of the person who hallucinated it. 

“I had a feeling there was something interesting to see round these parts. Not my usual haunt, but I can’t pass up a feeling.” Puck drew closer to Adam, not minding the silence. “There’s a great deal of chaos coming,” Puck said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “We fairy folk like chaos, but only when it’s of our own making. What’s happened and what’s coming is something we aren’t terribly fond of. In the interests of changing things, I’ve come to offer you a deal.” The creature sat down next to Adam and leaned into him. It was strange to feel the touch of someone other than Sam, but Adam found himself leaning into it rather than flinching away. The last few decades, it had been Adam comforting Sam when they were left alone, never the other way around. He missed a comforting touch meant to soothe him. Puck smiled at the action.

“I’m offering you and your brother a way out of here,” Puck said, slipping an arm around Adam’s shoulders and leaning in to whisper in his ear. “All you have to do is say yes. There’s the teensy little price of your soul, but I promise I’ll take better care of it than those idiots up there.” The words wound around Adam like smoke. Puck’s voice was so soft, so kind. Adam nodded. “You have to _say_ it,” Puck reminded him, squeezing gently.

It took some minutes for Adam to find his voice. In the interim, Sam’s screams had grown hoarse and ragged. Adam didn’t want to wonder whether it was because the archangels had done something to his throat, or if Sam had simply grown too exhausted by pain to keep screaming. Instead, he rolled his head onto Puck’s shoulder and examined the face of his would-be savior. Puck’s eyes were bright with mischief, his features sharp and just slightly to the left of human. There was no guarantee that accepting Puck’s deal would lead him to anything better than the life he had in the cage.

There was also little Adam could imagine that would be worse than the life he had in the cage. Besides, Puck had promised to free both him and Sam. Sam had been protecting Adam for so long. Would it really be so awful to return the favor? The archangels had both of them, but Puck only asked for the price of Adam’s soul. The choice was hardly much of a choice, in the end.

“Yes,” Adam said, the word strange and foreign in his ears, and the universe _shattered_.


	2. Begin Again

Sam woke up to something soft. There was light filtering through his closed eyelids - not the burning, flame-bright light of two archangels stripped of their human vessels, but the soft light of sunshine through a window in the morning. Everything around him felt soft and quiet. If this was a dream, it was the first one he’d had in the cage. More likely, perhaps the torture had finally become too much for his ragged soul to bear, and this was death. Endless quiet and softness and gentle morning light. If that were the case, Sam welcomed it. He sighed and curled into himself, startling when his limbs ran into something.

There was a quiet hum next to him, and then a voice. “Good morning,” the voice mumbled. The words swam sluggishly through Sam’s mind, finding meaning only with difficulty. Adam had quit speaking so early on, and since then Sam had heard nothing but Enochian and his own screaming. “I can tell you’re awake,” the same voice said. Like everything else, the voice was soft and gentle, lilting in a way that spoke of fondness. Sam reached out towards the voice, finding a soft and willing body. “Mm, hey there,” the voice said, and laughter followed it down into his arms. “Someone’s feeling cuddly this morning.” The person attached to the voice kissed his forehead and then his mouth, and he smiled and clutched her closer. When he opened his eyes, he was almost unsurprised to see Jess’s eyes only an inch from his own. “There you are,” she said, pecking a kiss onto his nose. 

He smiled at her, a foreign gesture after the cage, but one his mouth was glad to make. Her words were parsing more clearly in his mind the more she spoke, but he kept his own mouth closed. He feared that if he opened it, nothing but Enochian and pain would escape. He desperately wanted to keep the peaceful feeling of the moment unbroken. 

“Is everything alright?” Jess asked, after he’d been staring at her for several too short moments. In lieu of response, Sam closed his eyes again and kissed her. She made a soft, surprised sound, and then kissed back. Sam felt like he was drowning in the best possible way. If this was death, Sam’s only wish was that it could have come sooner. The smell and feel of Jess blanketed him in a long lost comforting familiarity. She kissed him with perhaps less urgency but no less love than Sam felt. He’d missed her so much. A small corner of his mind wondered if she had missed him, or if death had let her sleep until he could join her. Most of him was simply caught up in kissing her and holding her. He ran his hands up and down her back, along her arms, through her thick soft hair. Stirrings of arousal started in his belly, but he ignored them. For now, just to kiss and touch was enough. A noise of protest escaped his lips when Jess finally pulled back, and he was met again with the lovely sound of her laughter. “Not that I’m complaining,” she said with a smile clear in her voice, “but a girl does need to breath sometimes.” He opened his eyes and smiled back at her, trying to tug her back down. Instead of continuing as they had been, she swooped down for a quick peck and then squirmed out of his arms. “A girl also has to use the bathroom sometimes when she’s just woken up,” she said.

He watched her walk out of the room (so like their old bedroom; it must have been made from Jess’s memories - Sam’s memories had been dulled long ago by time and pain). She was beautiful, dressed in oversized baggy shorts and an old t-shirt and rumpled with sleep. When she returned, he tried to pull her back to bed. She tumbled on top of him, but resisted his attempts to return to kissing. “As much as I’d like to,” she said, propped up on her elbows against his bare chest, “we can’t stay in bed all day. I’m getting hungry, and we’ve both got work to do before the Halloween party tonight.” Sam’s brow wrinkled. If only his mouth would form the words, he would ask her what she meant. Instead, he allowed himself to be pulled out of the soft warmth of the bed. Finally, his own bladder made itself known.

“I have to,” he said quietly, voice trailing off as he pointed towards the door. The words tasted strange on his tongue, the shapes all wrong for speech and screaming. Jess, beautiful Jess, seemed to understand anyway.

“Have to what?” she teased. “Are you sure you’re alright? You’re not usually this shy and quiet.” She brought one small hand up to cup his cheek, and he brought his own hand up to cover hers. His reserves of speech had been exhausted, so he only smiled at her and nodded. There was still concern darkening her eyes, but she kissed him quickly and let him go.

The bathroom was down the hallway. His memories were too fuzzy to know if it was accurate to the old apartment he had shared with Jess, but he wanted to believe it was. Everything felt so real. The bathroom tiles were cold on his bare feet, every sound was loud and clear. The water shocked his hands when he went to wash them, too cold at first, a reminder of Lucifer’s touch that burned like dry ice. He turned the taps till it came out lukewarm. Perfect. He didn’t realize how much time he had spent marveling at the feel of the water against his skin until Jess stuck her head through the door.

“Oh good,” she said, “You didn’t get lost. I was starting to get worried.” Her tone was playful, but there was a frown marring her features. Sam tried a smile. The smile she returned didn’t quite erase the worry in her eyes.

“I’m ok,” Sam said.

Jess’s frown deepened. “You’ll have to either turn the water off or speak up if you want me to hear you, Sam.”

He turned off the water reluctantly and repeated, “I’m ok.”

Jess considered him from the doorway. “I know how much you don’t like talking about your feelings so I won’t press, but you know I’m here for you right? Whatever’s going through that gorgeous head of yours, you don’t have to deal with it alone.”

Sam smiled, digging through the wreck of his head for the right words. “I know,” he finally managed. “I love you.” That got a smile from Jess.

“I love you, too, Sam,” she said, before finally leaving him alone. He could hear her light steps descending the stairs to the kitchen. Sam gave himself the next few minutes alone, absently mindedly taking in the bathroom and his own reflection, until the smell of coffee began drifting upstairs. When he exited the bathroom and found the stairs, he could hear Jess moving about in the kitchen as well. He turned a corner on the first floor and was met with the sight of Jess with a book open in front of her and a bowl of cereal being absently consumed. Her spoon scraped at the bottom of the bowl as he watched, and she glared at it as though it had offended her with its emptiness. She stood and saw Sam, and her face went soft again. “Hey you,” she said, “let me get you something to eat?” He sat down next to her place at the table, and a moment later a bowl of cereal appeared in front of him. The next second, Jess retook her seat with a new bowl of cereal for herself.

Sam ate mechanically. It had been a long time since he had eaten actual food. The cereal stuck strangely in his throat, and chewing made his teeth tingle. He was reminded of the taste of each of his organs, all of which had been forcibly fed to him at one point or another enough times that he knew the differences in flavor between his heart and his lungs, his kidneys and his spleen. With the next bite, he choked. 

The cereal smelled of blood. The little flesh-colored rings felt suddenly heavy in his mouth, wet with more than milk. Which piece of himself had been ripped out this time, only to be shoved back in the wrong hole? Would it slip down his throat and esophagus only to encounter empty space where his stomach should be? Would it make it to his stomach to be dissolved in acid before dripping down in a half-digested slurry onto Adam’s waiting head? Or maybe it was his ears that he was eating, and that’s why he couldn’t hear Lucifer’s laughter or Michael’s angry howling. But it couldn’t be his ears, because he was screaming suddenly and _that_ sound was clear enough, sharp and loud and desperate and “Please, please, pleasepleaseplease-“

The bowl shattered, sending milk and cheerios and bits of porcelain skidding across the floor as his back hit a cabinet. His vision went dark, but the chanting kept going. There were hands on his face, on his shoulders, a voice that belonged to neither of his tormenters begging him to stop, chanting back at him a terrified litany of, “It’s okay, Sam, please stop screaming, it’s okay, please tell me what’s wrong, _Sam, please_.”

He opened his eyes and lifted his head from between his knees, and the world came back into focus. “Jess,” he said, and threw his arms around her. She hugged him back, gripping tighter than he would have expected her capable of. But that’s right. He was dead, and they were together, and she could hold him as tightly as she wished. His begging and screaming slowed and ebbed away into a silence that pressed down on him with a comforting weight. Finally, Jess pulled back, though she didn’t let go of him. “Sam, you don’t have to talk to me, but something is clearly wrong. I’m taking you to the health center.” He shook his head and pulled away. He wanted to stay alone with Jess. Besides, dead people didn’t need to worry about their health.

“Sorry,” Jess said, reaching out to him again, “but when you freak out and start screaming at your cereal, that’s not something I can just ignore.”

He shook his head again, and grabbed her wrists. “Can’t we just,” he began, but the words scraped at a throat raw from screaming. He was supposed to be done with pain.

“Just what, Sam?” Jess asked, dislodging his grip on her wrists so she could touch his cheek with one hand and check his temperature with the other.

“I want to go back to bed with you,” he whispered, leaning into her touch. He felt her shake her head back at him.

“You’re really starting to scare me, Sam. _Please_ let me take you to the health center?”

Though his throat felt like it had recently been punched by an archangel and words still came only reluctantly, he did his best to sound reassuring. “I just need to sleep. I’ll be okay.” By the look on Jess’s face, he’d missed reassuring by a mile. Still, she helped him up off the floor and back upstairs to bed, murmuring gently soothing nonsense to him the whole time.

Another soft noise of protest escaped when Jess turned to leave after getting him in bed. She moved back when he tried to reach for her.

“Just rest,” she said. “I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”

He did need her, but before he could form the words she was gone. The bedroom was still so soft and warm, but her absence left Sam with a pit of cold in his abdomen. If this was all just a dream, meant to break him down when Lucifer and Michael ripped him away, then it was going to work. If he lost this, if it wasn’t real, he didn’t think he could continue on. That thought lulled him to sleep, with tear tracks on his cheeks. 

—————————————

When Sam next awoke, it was evening, the only light in the room coming from a lamp by the door. Jess sat by the bed with a book in her hands, but her eyes were on Sam. “Hey,” she said, as soon as he opened his eyes. “Are you feeling any better? I called Becky and asked her to let the others know we probably won’t make the Halloween party tonight.”

There was something significant about that detail, Sam was certain, but all he could focus on was Jess. “I’m okay,” he said, scooting across the bed towards her.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I still think you should see a doctor, after what happened earlier.”

Sam nodded. “I’m sure.” She frowned, but didn’t push the topic.

“Do you at least feel up to eating something?” she asked instead. “You’ve been asleep the whole day.”

Sam had figured as much from the darkness out the window. Until Jess asked about food, however, he had not realized how hungry he was. Pain and hunger had been constant friends in the cage. Hunger hardly even ranked on the scale of pain he had been forced to endure. His stomach chose that moment to grumble loudly, as if in protest of his thoughts. “You feel up to getting out of bed, or should I bring the food to you?” Jess asked. In response, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood. His knees nearly buckled, but he caught himself with one hand on the nightstand and one in Jess’s hands as they reached to steady him. Her hands were so soft, and so much smaller than his. Even in college, his hands were rough, dangerous. It seemed that even in death he couldn’t be soft.

He followed Jess downstairs, back to the kitchen. His cereal from that morning had been cleaned up. There were two plates of cookies on the counter, one that Jess informed him she had stress-baked herself, and one that Becky and Zach had brought over after the phone conversation. Sam grabbed one of Jess’s cookies. He nibbled on it as Jess moved about the kitchen, pulling a Tupperware container from the fridge and sticking it in the microwave before returning to his side.

“That’s the leftover chicken from a few nights ago,” she said, one hand rubbing up and down his arm. “I made a whole boatload of cookies but I didn’t feel like cooking real food, so it’s leftover night tonight.” He hummed around a mouthful of cookie in response. Eventually, the microwave timer dinged, and Jess stood up to grab the food. At the same moment, there was a knock on the door. Sam tensed.

There were other people he had loved and lost, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to meet any of them just yet. Jess had died so long ago, he’d had time to bury his guilt over her death under a million other regrets. Seeing her again was nice. If his parents, or Ash, or Ellen and Jo were on the other side of that door, just to name a few, he suspected another screaming meltdown would be the least of his worries. “That’s probably Becca come by to check on us again,” Jess said, setting a plate in front of him. “Do you mind if I let her in? She was worried about you; hell, all our friends are probably worried.” Sam swallowed back the immediate “No” that rose in his throat. He would have to face others eventually, if this was death. He could hardly ask Jess to closet herself away with him for eternity. He nodded.

He heard Jess open the door behind him, heard her greet their visitor. “Oh, hey, Brady.”

Sam’s blood froze, and his vision went red. The world slowed around him as he turned to face their visitor. The man - no, the demon - at the door was the monster responsible for Jess’s death. That it should be here, tormenting her even after having killed her so many years ago, was sick, wrong, evil. 

Sam barely even though before his hand was swinging up, power that he had not accessed in so long surging through his veins. The demon glanced at him, smug expression turning to shock. Sam could imagine what it saw. The power inside him was sluggish, but he had practiced long with Ruby before her death. It gathered, quicker and quicker, in his palm, until with a snarl he curled his fingers in and felt the _tug_ of a demon being forcibly ripped from its host. Black smoke flowed from the monster’s open mouth, its eyes frozen open in shock. A dark glee rose up in Sam with the demon blood. This creature had caused so much pain, but it would never hurt anyone again. The smoke swirled around the dying body of its host, panicked and frantic as Sam tightened his hold. Blood rushed in his ears and dripped from his nose, wiping out sound and thought and narrowing his focus to the black mass in front of him. A light began to glow at the center of the mass, lighting up the corpse and overtaking the demon. A few seconds and an eternity later, Sam’s hold vanished with the demon’s death, and he slumped forward onto the floor. Blood dripped from his nose, as well as from his bottom lip where he’d bitten a hole in it. Better than dripping from the ceiling, from a demon-inflicted slash all the way across Jess’s stomach.

Jess was screaming.

Oh, Jess was angry.

“What the _hell_ , Sam? That was, what the fuck? I tried not to push, but that _wasn’t fucking human_ , and now I am demanding an explanation!”

Her voice washed in and out like a staticky radio station, and Sam’s vision greyed at the edges. His whole body felt like he’d gone several rounds with Lucifer, but there was a black joy in his heart too. After a year of suppressing the powers he’d gained from demon blood, and then uncountable years in the cage with no chance to use them, he had almost forgotten how good it felt to be powerful.

Another voice interrupted Jess’s panicky, angry begging. A voice Sam would know anywhere, though it was higher than he’d grown used to, closer to the voice he’d known growing up rather than the one that had called him a monster, told him to stay away, and finally brought him back from the brink of destruction long enough to throw himself, Adam, and two archangels into the Cage. “What the _hell_ did you do to Sammy!?”

Sam blacked out. Again.


	3. Strange Things Are Happening

This time, Sam awoke with wet clothes and the taste of salt in his mouth. There was a small cut on his arm as well, already scabbing over. This was getting ridiculous. He’d spent centuries being tortured, but at least Lucifer had stopped with the mind games once they were in the Cage. Now he had to be in some kind of afterlife, but one that included demons and Dean. Dean couldn’t be dead. He’d promised to go to Lisa, to live a life with a family and safety. He’d _promised._

Even if he’d broken his promise and gotten himself killed, that still didn’t explain Brady.

Maybe Lucifer had gotten bored of simple torture of the body and soul, or maybe Michael had. Maybe this really was just some dream they’d spun for Sam to keep him occupied while they decided on the most painful ways to fuck it up. Nothing made sense, otherwise. He could still feel the sick joy of using his demon powers, the slick feel of demon blood lighting up his veins like the best kind of poison. That could be their plot. He’d been going mad under their torture, but it had been a base, empty sort of madness. He had long since abandoned shame at screaming and begging, but he still did his best to draw their ire away from Adam, to offer what protection he could while locked in the Cage. He’d done his best to hold onto the smallest scraps of himself, memories of loved ones and the constant knowledge that while he may have accidentally doomed the world, he had saved it too, in the end.

Did Lucifer and Michael want to destroy those memories by replacing them with his addiction? It made a certain sort of awful sense. It would even explain why Dean had been added to the dream. There was no one better at breaking Sam’s mind than his big brother. As Sam lay with his thoughts slowly coalescing into ideas, sounds began to filter through the bedroom door, which had been left barely ajar. The voices were arguing, clearly had been for a while.

“If you don’t stop waving that gun around, I will call the police!” Jess was saying (hissing, really). “I don’t care if they’ll arrest Sam, too! Maybe they _should_ arrest Sam! He _killed_ somebody, after all! Though judging by that miniature arsenal you’ve got on you, I’m starting to think you don’t actually care.”

“I keep telling you, you don’t know what you’re dealing with!” And there was Dean, abrasive and domineering as ever. At least he wasn’t hitting on Jess this time.

“Given that you keep stonewalling me instead of explaining, I’m starting to think you don’t know what we’re dealing with, either!”

Sam tuned them out again, dropping his head into his hands. 

If this was a trick from Lucifer, then why weren’t they uniting to hurt him? Unless they were waiting for more hallucinations to show up.

If this was death, why would Jess be angry with him for killing a demon?

Nothing was adding up, and his head was killing him. The yelling from the hallway started to remind him of the bellowing of archangels. He found himself wondering if Jess and Dean were actually Lucifer and Michael wearing dream faces. That would certainly explain why they had abandoned Sam to fight with each other. If that was the case, he should take what time he could to enjoy the illusions of comfort around him. He hadn’t truly slept in centuries; it was little wonder he found himself so exhausted now that he had the chance.

The door banged open in the middle of his musings.

“You’re awake,” Dean said, stopping abruptly in the doorway. Jess huffed and pushed past him, stepping further into the room.

She ignored Dean’s glare and crossed her arms over her chest. She had always been surprisingly intimidating when she wanted to be. “So, your estranged brother here is telling me that black smoke stuff was a demon, and that you might be possessed as well to have killed it with your mind. Wanna tell me what’s actually going on, before I call the cops and have you both arrested? I love you, Sam, but you’re being real fucking crazy right now _and you killed our friend_.”

“I told you,” Dean growled, “if he was a demon he would have reacted to the salt or the holy water.”

Sam interrupted the ensuing glare-off by standing up, putting the bed between himself and the vision of the two people he loved.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” he said in Enochian, “but if this is a trick you can cut it out.”

“Great,” Jess said, throwing up her arms. “Now he’s speaking in tongues.”

Dean stepped away from him. “That’s not any language I recognize. You’re not a demon and you didn’t react to silver, but whatever you are it ain’t my brother.”

And there was the cruelty Sam had been expecting. Strangely, the words, while cutting on the surface, were laced beneath with fear. Sam ignored the gun Dean brought up to point at his face. “I am Sam Winchester,” he said, still in Enochian, “but I’m having a hard time believing you’re Dean.”

Dean and Jess both flinched and looked at each other. “Oh good,” Jess said first, “he knows his name and yours. Unless and ‘Sam Winchester’ and ‘Dean’ are actually secretly words in whatever creepy fucking language he’s using.” She turned to Sam. “You seemed to understand me just fine earlier. Did killing someone with your brain tire you out too much for English or something?”

She wasn’t far off the mark, in all honesty. Sam still felt about three seconds from face-planting right back onto the bed, in spite of having slept for at least a day by that point (though really, if it was a dream then his periods of sleep could have been much shorter than they’d seemed). His stomach betrayed him with an unhelpful rumble. He held in the yawn that wanted to follow with sheer stubbornness.

“When’s the last time he ate?” Dean’s gun even lowered at the sound, and wasn’t that just like Dean? More worried about his kid brother’s eating habits than whatever creature he thought had taken over Sam’s body.

Jess merely crossed her arms harder and glowered. “It’s been a little hard to get food into him what with all the screaming and the fainting and, oh yeah, the killing people with his brain.”

“I think the last thing I ate was my kidneys a few days ago,” Sam said helpfully, choosing to finally use English. The words were slurred, but understandable enough. Silence descended on the room for all of five seconds.

“If you ate my brother, you’ll be begging for death before I’m done with your monster ass,” Dean growled, bringing the gun back up at the same time as Jess shouted, “What the fuck do you mean the last thing you ate was _your own kidneys_?” Her voice trailed off into an incredulous shriek at the end. Sam shook his head to stop the ringing in his ears. There was too much noise. Too much noise and not enough air. He could remember how his kidneys had tasted, could recall the exact texture of them from how many times they’d been shoved down his throat.

He could smell them. His insides were rotting, but they never just disappeared.

He could smell his insides rotting, as they always did when he was staked out and left for a while, flayed open and immobilized while he decayed, knowing that his flesh would be whole again the next day but still unable to stop it in the moment

unable to stop the screaming laughter when he broke down and cried and begged for death

what would they make him eat this time, was that why Dean was here, Dean who had always made sure little Sammy had enough to eat even when he had to go without

it would certainly be ironic

they must have taken his lungs, because he couldn’t breathe

he couldn’t breathe

_he couldn’t breathe_

And then there were hands around his arms, in his hair, dragging him back from the puddle of vomit on the floor, and there were voices calling his name.

“Sam, Sammy, come on man, what the hell is wrong with him!”

“I don’t know! I told you, he’s been freaking out ever since yesterday morning. I don’t know what’s wrong!”

“M’fine,” Sam mumbled. Even if this were a trick or a dream or death, how could he keep ignoring the fear in those voices? Hysterical laughter met his words.

“Oh yeah, Sam,” Jess said, her small hands still running frantically over his arms and back, “you’re fine, great, wonderful. How silly of me not to realize that your random panic attacks and sudden magic powers are nothing to worry about!”

“New theory,” Dean was saying next to her. “Witches.”

“Witches. Really?”

“Listen, Miss Whoever-You-Are, - “

“ _Jess_.”

“Yeah, whatever. Our dad’s made a lot of enemies stopping evil shit in his life. Witches love revenge by cursing. It makes sense.”

“Not witches,” Sam said, reaching out to grab Dean’s arm. “Thought you didn’t believe I was Sam.”

Dean scoffed. “I’m still not sure what I think. You’re not any monster I know of. Unless you’re some kind of evil crybaby, I’ve changed my mind to witches.” There was a light thumping sound and a low, “ow,” from Dean.

“Don’t call him a crybaby. It’s not nice.”

“I’m starting to see why you two get along. Why don’t you get him a glass of water, sweetheart, so he can wash some of that puke taste out of his mouth.”

Sam could practically feel Jess rolling her eyes. “Are you ok if I leave you two alone for a minute, Sam?” Sam nodded. The motion almost made him puke again, but he forced the bile back down. “Alright. But if I come back and find you’ve shot him,” she said to Dean in a much harder voice, “I’ll shot _you_.” She stood, and Sam tracked her progress out the door through the vibrations in the carpet. Once she was gone, Dean moved around in front of his face.

“Hey Sam,” Dean said in a low, quick voice, “I came here originally to tell you that dad’s gone missing. He was on a hunting trip and hasn’t checked in for a few days. I was gonna ask you to come help me find him, but I’m starting to wonder if his disappearance is connected to whatever’s going on with you. Is there anything you can tell me to help me figure out what’s happened?”

Sam remembered this. His present surroundings were slowly wrapping themselves back around him, settling in his mind. This wasn’t just a memory of his old apartment. This was the day (or, to be more accurate judging by the light through the window, the day after) Dean first came to him in college, asking him to go on a quest to find their father. He was supposed to go with Dean to… to… put a ghost to rest, maybe, though time had dulled the memory. Then he was supposed to return home, to find Jess burning up on the ceiling along with any hope he’d had for a normal life. That memory would always be crystal clear. The heat of the cage reminded him, sometimes, Jess burning above him, on the rare occasions that he had enough free mental energy to remember anything.

“It’s not witches,” Sam said, instead of any of the other thoughts chasing themselves through his mind.

“Okay,” Dean replied, frustration clear in the way he drew out the word. “If it’s not witches, can you tell me what it is?” 

Sam shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to tell Dean all the ways he had failed his brother. Light footsteps signaled Jess returning with a glass of water and some washcloths a moment later. “So,” she said as she helped Sam drink and then patted at his face with the wet cloths, “tell me more about your theories.”

“This is family business,” Dean said. “If you have a friend you can stay with or something, you should get out now. Trust me, this ain’t a world you want to get involved in.”

Even if it was too late for her in reality, Sam almost wished that Jess would take Dean’s advice. If she had never gotten involved with Sam, she could still be alive. As understanding as she was when it came to not pushing Sam to talk about his past, though, he should have known she wouldn’t back down from helping him in a situation like this.

Whatever this situation was.

“I’m not leaving my boyfriend,” she said, not looking away from Sam. “You can tell me about why witches and demons are going after the man I love, or you can deal with me figuring it out for myself. One of those choices will be easier on both of us, but either way I’m not leaving.”

Dean stomped over to the chair. “Whatever, stay then,” he said.

Explaining the cliff notes version of their lives still took Dean nearly an hour. Eventually, Jess suggested that they move the conversation to the living room where they could all sit. She curled up next to Sam on the couch, though she kept a few inches of space between them after making sure that Sam was comfortable and hopefully not about to start screaming again. When Jess started peppering Dean with questions, Sam entered a fitful doze.

Everything was confusing. This made no sense as the afterlife, but it also made no sense as a dream. If Lucifer or Michael was trying to trick him into believing that he was out of the cage so that he would let his guard down, why would they send him back to this day? For that matter, if they were really running out of physical tortures for him, why wouldn’t they take the much simpler route of making him watch while they tortured Adam? He’d made it clear that he cared about protecting Adam from the worst of their wrath. They, in turn, had made it clear that they didn’t care much what happened to Adam, so long as Sam was in pain.

And yet - 

The only remaining option was even more absurd than the rest. It wasn’t possible to change the past, even if time travel was, and Sam had certainly already changed things from the first time around. If this was the past, he should have been on the road with Dean. He certainly shouldn’t have been killing Brady and accidentally bringing Jess into the supernatural world. 

The rest of the day passed in a blur as Sam retreated inside his head to think. His head had been his only safe space in the cage, where Lucifer had no need or reason to possess him. Now he could take refuge there again to re-evaluate his surroundings and decide on what to believe. Jess brought him soup several times, and Dean alternately begged and demanded that he talk whenever Jess was gone, but Sam barely noticed. If this was real, a true second chance, then he’d have time to make it up to Dean later, starting with not starting the apocalypse.


	4. Silver and Gold

Dean begged off of staying the night on Sam’s couch. The whole apartment rubbed him wrong, every space screaming Sam-and-Jess with no room for Dean Winchester in the nice, normal rooms full of carpets without mysterious stains and the smell of cookies and cleanliness instead of cheap cleaning products and stale cigarette smoke. He just wanted to find a decent dive bar, drink himself into oblivion for a night, and then figure out what the hell was wrong with his baby brother. So, after helping Jess get a now-catatonic Sam back upstairs to bed, Dean fled.

As soon as he stepped outside, he felt like a weight had lifted from his shoulders.

It was the Saturday before Halloween, and all the bars nearby were predictably already overflowing with sound and people.

A quick call to his dad went straight to voicemail as expected these last few days. “Hey dad,” Dean said, making his way down a street full of drunk, costumed college kids, “If you get this message, call me back. Something is seriously wrong, and I could use your help.” He shut the phone with a snap, shoved it in his pocket, and ducked into a promising bar full of smoke and laughter.

Three purple nurples later, his head was feeling pleasantly fuzzy. A pretty, dark haired woman smiled at him from across the bar, and Dean’s own lips turned up in response. She was wearing sparkly shit in her hair and makeup, and pointy ears in honor of Halloween, but Dean was willing to overlook small flaws for a body that nice. “Get me a glass of whiskey,” he said to the bartender, not looking away from the girl. A minute later, he slid into the seat next to her.

“Hey, I couldn’t help but notice you were staring,” he said with his flirtiest grin.

She ducked her head and laughed, a light tinkling sound that had Dean inwardly smirking. Sammy’s problems were tomorrow’s problem, tonight Dean was totally getting laid.

“It’s hard not to stare when someone as cute as you walks in,” she said, twisting a lock of hair around her fingers and watching Dean through long lashes.

A high-heeled foot ran up his leg, and he leaned forward. “And what’ll you do if I buy you a drink?” he asked. She giggled again.

“If it’s something more delicious than that whiskey you’ve got,” she said, glancing over at his glass, “then I think you’ll be pretty happy with the answer. In response, Dean downed his glass of whiskey and flagged down the bartender.

He woke up the next morning in a cheap motel room with a screaming hangover, but considering that he was also naked, he was willing to call it a good night. The flashes of memory he could bring up included a lot more smiling and giggling, and the woman who’s name he couldn’t remember for the life of him following him home. He hoped more of the night would come back to him through the day, but in the meantime there was work to do.

It was time to figure out what the fuck was wrong with Sam. He swung his legs over the bed, swallowed down the puke that wanted to escape, and finished standing. “Ugh,” he groaned, staggering over to his shirt where it lay on the floor next to the door. His pants and boxers were found tangled together under the window, and his socks were under the bed, next to his shoes. Finally dressed, he collapsed into the rickety plastic chair next to a small table and wondered if he could get away with never moving again. It took him a few minutes of fighting down nausea to realize that the one good smell in the room was coming from a coffee cup on the nightstand.

Coffee won in the struggle between his desire not to move again and his desire to restore life to his body, but it was a hard fought battle.

A sigh of relief accompanied the last dregs of the coffee disappearing down his throat. Hopefully the impala wasn’t too far away, because he still desperately needed ibuprofen, but at least his stomach had stopped trying to claw its way out of his body. He pulled his phone from his pocket, flipped it open, and sighed again, this time in disappointment.

No new messages.

He dialed his dad’s number again, hardly waiting till the voicemail message finished before speaking. “Hey dad,” he said, keeping his voice level with difficulty, “it’s Dean again. Look, I don’t know if you’re in trouble, or if you’re just too busy to check in, but this is about Sammy. Something’s going on, and I think Sam’s in trouble. I’m at Stanford with him, and he’s acting like he’s cursed or something. I’ll keep you updated.” The sound of the phone snapping shut was too loud in the motel. Dean jammed his feet into his shoes and stepped outside.

The sun was already high in the sky, and the few puffy little clouds did little to block its light. Why Sam had wanted to go to school in California was beyond him. Not like Sam was the type to spend his time ogling pretty girls in bikinis at the beach, which was about the only reason Dean could see for living in a state that was half deserts and half earthquakes and all full of way too much sunshine for his hung-over eyes.

Nearly an hour and one pause to puke into bushes later, Dean stumbled into Sam’s apartment, making a mental note to berate Sam once he was feeling better. The idiots had left the front door unlocked. He glanced around the empty kitchen and was about to head upstairs when his eyes landed on an innocuous object sitting on the kitchen counter. It was a small journal, frayed with age and rough handling, and brimming over with sticky notes, pictures, and folded over pages torn from books and other journals. Dean lifted the journal with tense hands, turning it over before opening it.

The handwriting inside was intimately familiar. He had sat in countless motels and apartments, watching his father’s strong, sure hands documenting case after case, creature after creature, in this same journal. He could barely remember a time when his did didn’t have this journal; those memories were tied up in the fuzzy, rose-tinted recollections of the time before their family had been torn apart and changed forever by a yellow-eyed demon. He had that journal on him _always_. The journal fell back to the counter with a thump that Dean barely heard as he turned and bolted up the stairs.

“Sam!” he called, continuing in a lower voice thick with worry, “you’d better be ok, dammit Sammy.”

He burst through the bedroom door to find Jess standing in front of Sam’s bed, a saltshaker in one hand and a knife in the other.

“Is there more danger?” she asked. Sam was propped up on pillows behind her, looking at Dean like he was trying really hard not to roll his eyes. There was a bowl in his hands, and an open computer next to him that Dean took in at a glance.

“Has dad shown up?” he asked Sam.

Jess answered. “No one’s been here but us since you left last night.” 

Sam nodded behind her. “It’s true. Why, have you heard from him?” His tone sounded disbelieving, and Dean scowled. Trust Sammy to have no faith in their father.

“I haven’t heard from him because he’s in trouble,” Dean said, still ignoring Jess. “His journal is downstairs, which means _someone_ has been here.”

Sam did perk up at that. He set the bowl down on the nightstand and turned to Jess with furrowed brows and distant eyes. “Things are changing already,” he said, which made no damn sense. “We had to get it ourselves the first time around.”

“Excuse me,” Dean said, interrupting their significant staring contest. “But does someone want to tell me what’s going on?”

They both looked at him, annoyingly in synch. “If this is real,” Sam said, ignoring Jess’s huff, “then I’m in the past. I’ve been through this once already, but things are different, which shouldn’t be possible with time travel.”

“Nothing should be possible with time travel,” Dean shot back, “because time travel isn’t real!”

Jess snorted, and Dean glared at her. Undaunted, she merely raised one blonde eyebrow at him. “Why shouldn’t time travel be possible? You want me to believe that a secret world of demons and witches and other horrible things are real, but time travel is where you draw the line at too ridiculous to exist?”

“Yeah, I do,” Dean said. “I may not be a smart-ass college boy like Sammy, but I still know that time travel could cause all kinds of universe destroying paradoxes.”

“That’s why it’s not supposed to be possible to change anything,” Sam said, infuriatingly calm. Dean almost preferred the freaking out and crying Sam to a Sam who sat around in bed patiently explaining to Dean how he’d done something completely impossible.

“I can’t believe you’re buying this,” he said to Jess. If he could get her to see reason, maybe they could work together to make Sammy see that he was clearly still crazy.

Unfortunately, Jess had other ideas. “Again,” she said flatly, “demons. Witches. Ghosts. Time travel fits into this perfectly, from where I’m standing.”

“Fine,” Dean said, changing tack. “Let’s say Sam time travelled. Is one of you gonna tell me how he did it?”

Sam did look lost at that. “I don’t know,” he said, and Dean scoffed. The shifty look in his brother’s eyes said he had an idea, at the very least, and it wasn’t one Dean was going to like. “Maybe we should look at dad’s journal. It might have a clue, from whoever brought it here.” Sam was still hiding something, but Dean could acknowledge a decent idea when he heard one.

“Fine. I’ll grab dad’s journal, and we’ll see if he left us a chapter on _time travel_.”

He stomped downstairs, grabbed the journal, did a cursory sweep of the first floor just in case, and was feeling no better by the time he stomped back up to Sam’s room.

The next few minutes passed in a tense silence while Sam and Jess leaned against each other and loomed into Dean’s space as he flipped through the journal. Finally, “Stop!” Sam said, pointing to a few lines at the bottom of the last page of text. The lines of text mentioned a Woman in White, put to rest the previous day. It was written a quick, spidery hand entirely different from their dad’s handwriting, and followed up with a location.

“I know that location,” Sam said, staring at the page.

Dean waited. Sam kept staring.

“Share with the class?” he said, when it became apparent Sam had once more disappeared inside his head. His response was nearly a whisper.

“The Roadhouse.”

“Yeah, that’s not helpful, Sammy.”

“That’s the Roadhouse. We used to know the people who run it, in the future. It burned down. They all died. I got them killed.”

Well, that was just a barrel of good news. “Whatever it is, it’s pretty clear we need to go there,” Dean said, ignoring the sickeningly sweet cooing noises Jess had started making at Sam.

“What did you do with Brady’s body?” Sam asked out of nowhere.

“I burned it while you were sleeping off your panic attack.” Jess shifted uncomfortably. Dean suspected she still wasn't happy with his method of dealing with the demon's body, but that was just tough for her.

“We have to leave anyway, then. People will notice his disappearance eventually, and the cops will start sniffing around. The Roadhouse is a good a place as any to go for information, at least.”

Jess shifted away. “Why shouldn’t we go to the cops?” she asked. “They should know about all this.”

“They won’t help us,” Sam said, staring into Jess’s eyes in that disturbingly earnest way he had and cutting off Dean’s rougher retort. “They’ll just try to put us in jail, and trust me, that is the _last_ thing the world needs.”

“And what exactly does the world need?” Dean asked, interrupting their staring contest.

Even if Dean had been expecting any particular answer, what he got would not have been it. “The apocalypse is coming. Angels are real, Dean, and they want you and me as starring vessels.” 

Dean still had his doubts, but he could tell by Sam’s face that he believed it, at least. Either way, he had a good point about getting away from the scene of a crime.

“Alright, so we’ll go to the Roadhouse,” Dean agreed.

“I’m coming with you.”

He stared at Jess. “You sure as fuck aren’t.”

“He’s my boyfriend, and this affects me too. According to Sam, that demon was intending to kill _me_.”

“According to Sam, he’s a time traveller trying to stop angels. I’m not sure we can rely on Sam right now!”

“I trust Sam more than I trust you!”

“Yeah, I’m not dragging an untrained civilian around the country while I hunt monsters, especially not with my dad and brother out of commission!”

“She’s coming.” Both of them snapped around to look at Sam. He was still staring at the journal, but his eyes were far away. “I’ve lost a lot of people, but I’ve also learned that if we want to beat what’s coming, we need as much help as we can get. She’s coming.”

Dean threw his hands up in disgust. “Fine,” he said, “but it’s your fault when she ends up dead.” Sam flinched, and Dean ignored the flicker of guilt that bubbled up at the gesture. “I’ll be waiting outside by the Impala. If you’re down there in fifteen minutes, I leave without both of you.”

—————————————

Ten minutes later, Sam and Jess appeared around the corner of the alley. Jess started towards Dean as soon as she saw him, but Sam halted at the alley mouth. “What now,” Dean muttered to himself as he swung down off his baby’s hood and stalked towards Sam.

He breezed past Jess, who finally seemed to realize she’d left Sam behind, and pulled up next to Sam. Following Sam’s gaze, he saw only another apartment building, with two women exiting the front door. Dean opened his mouth, and Sam blinked, shook his head, and walked across the street without even looking for cars. At this rate, Sammy was gonna get himself killed before his civilian girlfriend.

“Lily?” Sam was saying when Dean followed him. “Lily Baker?”


	5. The Road Less Traveled

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should probably mention at this point: this whole story is a totally self-indulgent exercise. I understand if people are giving up due to this story being totally ridiculous and a bit of a rambling mess. That said, I do also adore comments from anyone who is reading this silly thing.

The Roadhouse was a cross between an Old Western, a horror movie, and Indiana Jones. Even after spending a week there, she still couldn’t decide if she loved it or hated it. On the one hand, it was better than the string of dirty motels they’d stayed in for their days on the road. Also, her inner fantasy geek was having a hell of a time, learning about a hidden world of supernatural creatures while a badass older woman taught her how to handle a rifle and carve stakes out of different types of wood. On other hand, no one except Ellen seemed to like her much.

Lily and her girlfriend, Katie, mostly stuck together and glared at everyone. They hadn’t quite gotten over being essentially kidnapped by Sam and Dean with the only explanation being that Lily had special powers given to her by a demon, and said demon would go after them both eventually if he wasn’t stopped. To be fair, Jess couldn’t entirely blame them. The memory of the encounter still felt a bit dream-like to Jess.

_The pale, skinny blonde girl looked at Sam when he called her name, eyes narrowed in confusion. “Do I know you?” she asked. Her friend, a short Latina woman with a deceptively loose stance, put a hand on her shoulder._

_Sam pulled up short about a dozen feet away. “Not yet,” he said. Jess was entirely unsurprised when this didn’t seem to make the girl any less wary. She wanted to pull Sam away back to his brother, but a morbid curiosity like watching a train wreck held her feet in place as Sam continued. “Your mom died when you were a baby, in a house fire.”_

_The girl’s eyes widened, and friend stepped in front of her. “And how would you know that?” she asked, in the belligerent tone Jess recognized from any woman who was entirely done with strange men accosting her on the street. Her normally reasonably socially aware boyfriend just soldiered on, even if Jess could have told him that his calming voice was not going to help here. Not when he was over six feet of greasy, muscular man who was bringing up creepy knowledge of a strange woman’s past while his brother loomed next to him, clearly at least a friend._

_“My mom died when I was baby in a house fire, too,” he said. “It was a demon that killed both our parents. That demon’s going to come back, and he’s going to try to hurt us, as well as all the other kids he did this to.”_

_The friend scoffed. “Right,” she said, her shoulders going back as her hand went to one pocket of her jacket. Jess would bet anything that there was mace in that pocket, or possibly a tazer. “Why don’t you back the fuck off my girlfriend, and we don’t have to have any trouble.”_

_Jess finally unstuck her feet at that and stepped over to Sam. “We should just go,” she said, pulling on his shoulder. She noted the leer on his brother’s face and almost wished he’d say something and get himself tazered._

_Sam, sweet, helpful idiot that he was sometimes, just had to keep talking. “You’ll get abilities that can hurt people,” he said, and wow that was so not a reassuring thing to say to women who were already on edge. As expected, both women bristled. “I have visions, dreams of the future, other people can move things, or control people with their voices, and you’ll get the ability to electrocute things. Please, let me help you.”_

_Completely unsurprisingly, the girlfriend pulled the mace out of her pocket. “Look, buddy,” she started, but Lily cut her off with a hand on her arm and a soft, “Wait.”_

_Everyone except Sam gaped at Lily. She stepped back up around her girlfriend, wringing her hands together, and spoke in a soft voice, eyes not leaving Sam’s face. “I can make lights turn on just by touching them,” she said. “Ever since I was little, things have happened around me, sometimes. Bad things. Lately, I feel like there’s electricity under my skin, and I can’t get it out no matter what, even though my doctor keeps saying there’s nothing wrong with me.”_

_“The bad things that happen are due to demons, and they’re not your fault,” Sam said, holding her gaze. “The electricity is from the demon that killed your mom. Come with us, and I’ll do my best to keep you safe.”_

_Next to her, her girlfriend snorted and waved the arm with the mace. “This is completely nuts, Lily. You’re not actually buying that some demon gave you superpowers! We’ll get you another doctor, one who actually knows what they’re talking about and get some real answers, but this is crazy.”_

_Lily glanced at her, and then down at the sidewalk. “Maybe it’s not so crazy, Katie.” She looked at Sam again, who was doing his best impression of a puppy. Jess knew from experience how effective it was. “I’m going with them.”_

_The girlfriend looked back and forth between Sam and Lily, before visibly coming to a decision. “Fine,” she said, voice clearly indicating her that she was only going along with this for Lily’s sake. “I’m coming too, then.”_

_“What about your degree?” Lily asked, head whipping back around to Katie. “You were so excited about starting your EE Masters.”_

_“It’s just a degree, Lils,” Katie said, eyes going soft as she stared at her girlfriend. “If you really believe these people and think they can help you, then I’m coming with you. You’re more important to me than a degree._

Jess had half expected them to be gone every morning of the trip when they reconvened outside of whatever motel they’d stopped in for the night. In spite of her doubts, however, both girls were still with them, for all that they still mainly stuck to themselves.

When they got to Roadhouse, Katie had smiled at something other than her girlfriend for the first time when Dean and Sam ended up held at rifle-point by the women who ended up being the owners of the Roadhouse. Though they’d managed to convince Ellen and Jo to let them stick around for a while they figured out what to do about the apocalypse (even after Dean got his face slammed into the bar for hitting on Jo), the atmosphere remained tense.

Jo spent most of her time watching Dean with a look halfway between disgust and envy when she wasn’t doing chores for her mother. Dean spent most of his time holed up with his father, who had shown up a few days after they reached the Roadhouse, shouted a lot while claiming he was _perfectly calm, dammit_ , and then dragged Dean off to a back room to presumably interrogate him, while ignoring Jess entirely.

And Sam was still having a hard time.

If not for the secret excursion she’d made the night before they left Standford, Jess would almost wish she had stayed behind.

_In spite of all she had heard over the last few days, Jess still felt slightly silly when she slipped out of the apartment in the middle of the night with an armful of candles and some vanilla incense she’d bought at a little 24-hour hippie store near campus. Given that it was almost 5am on a Sunday, there was no one at the small park near her apartment. Even the drunks had all stumbled home by now. The swings creaked ominously in the slight breeze, and rustling leaves sounded like whispers in the dark, but Jess powered through her nerves. If she was successful in her task she could start worrying, but for now she was alone._

_She_ was. __

_She set her candles down beneath a tree near the merry-go-round and looked around, reminding herself one more time that she really was totally alone. If this didn’t work, she was going to feel ridiculous. Better no one saw her embarrass herself. If it did work, better no one saw the result._

_Folding her legs beneath her, she sank down into the slightly damp, patchy grass. Several matches later, all the candles were lit in a ring and the incense was sending up a thick vanilla smoke. She coughed, wishing she’d brought something to cover her mouth and block the smell. Vanilla had never been her favorite (the taste or the smell of it), but if she wasn’t crazy, it came highly recommended by the creature she was trying to summon._

_She took a deep breath, and then another one. Years of therapy had pounded into her head just how crazy she was being._

_“Fuck therapy,” she said aloud, nearly blowing out one of the candles. Without wasting anymore time, she squared her shoulders and recited the chant she had discovered as a child over ten years ago. The words felt stupid, but she forced them out, not pausing till the whole thing was done._

_Twelve years had dulled the memory. There was every possibility that she had messed up the wording. Still, she gave it five minutes before she blew out the candles. Five minutes for him to appear, and then she would slink back home, with Sam and his brother hopefully none the wiser._

_Five minutes passed._

_She blew out the first candle, resolutely ignoring the little bubble of disappointment in her chest, and a voice spoke from the behind her._

_“Well, if it isn’t little Jessica Moore, all grown up and still praying to Trickster Gods.”_

_She almost fell over in her haste to turn. There he stood behind her, the same being she remembered from her childhood, just as outrageous and terrifying as he had appeared to her at ten. He was sucking on a lollipop, but she knew the power those hands could wield at the snap of his fingers._

_“I didn’t think I’d see you again,” he said around the sucker._

_“Why?” she asked, forcing her legs to straighten beneath her. She’d be damned if she kneeled for him. “Because you abandoned me?”_

_“Hey,” he said, taking the sucker out of his mouth so he could point at her with it, “I told you not to tell anyone about me.”_

_“I was ten! What did you expect me to do?”_

_“Tell everyone about me and learn a lesson about summoning dangerous magical creatures to solve your problems for you.”_

_“I got kicked out of school! We moved to a new state, and I went through the next eight years of therapy telling me you didn’t exist, that you were just a voice in my head. It set back my transition for a year! And may I remind you that I was_ ten _?”_

_“How many years of therapy do you think your bullies went through? May I remind you that everything I did to them came out of your precocious little ten year old brain?”_

_Jess glared. Her chest was heaving with anger, but a small part of her, the grown-up part that had gotten over that childhood hurt, reminded her of her purpose in coming summoning Loki. She needed to find out if there was any truth to the nonsense her boyfriend had spouted in his last waking period, and who better than a Trickster God to tell her if it was possible?_

_“Look,” she said, forcing her anger down, “thanks for actually showing up this time, but I didn’t summon you just to chat about the good old days.”_

_The creature’s lips curled in a facsimile of a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “No,” he said. “I suppose you have some new trouble in your life you’d like me to handle.”_

_She breathed deep and thought about Sam. “Actually, it’s my boyfriend.”_

_“Dump him,” the creature said._

_“What?”_

_“If your boyfriend is a danger to you, dump him. Call the cops if you have to. You don’t need me for your boy troubles.” There was an intensity in his eyes that belied his words, a hardness that reminded her of why she had called him the first time all those years ago. He was a Trickster God, but the book she’d found said he used his tricks to bring justice to bad people. The last thing she needed was him thinking that Sam was some abusive asshole who would hurt her for her secrets. Not when he was the sweetest man she knew. Not when he’d never once made an issue of her gender, just told her she was his beautiful, kind, brilliant girlfriend and that was all he cared about, when she told him she was trans._

_“He’s not dangerous,” she said, thoughts of Sam having calmed something in her. “Though he seems to have gone crazy.” Loki raised one eyebrow; she hurried on to explain. “He’s been acting weird ever since Friday. Panic attacks, exhaustion, forgetting where he is, thinking the world around him isn’t real. Tonight, he told me that he was from the future, and that,_ if this is real _, he has to stop the apocalypse. I need to know if he’s just crazy, or if what he says is true.”_

_Loki was silent. Though he (or at least, the form he chose to appear in) was shorter than her now, he seemed to grow larger as she waited for him to speak. The power beneath his skin became a tangible thing in the air around them. Fear for Sam had driven her out to the little park and the ritual to call a God, but now she wondered if she had made a terrible choice._

_Finally, his gaze returned from wherever his mind had gone, and he met her eyes again. “Your boyfriend is Sam Winchester.” It wasn’t a question. She nodded anyway._

_“Well,” he said, seeming at a loss and unsure exactly what to do with his own confusion. “Isn’t that interesting. Little Sammy Winchester, defying the Plan.”_

_“So it’s true?” Jess asked, hating the way her voice trembled._

_In response, he disappeared. There was a wind and the whisper of feathers that accompanied his disappearance, and Jess blinked, mouth open in shock. He hadn’t even snapped his fingers before he ran away. “Even for a Trickster God, that was rude,” she muttered to the empty air._

_“Sorry, it was a bit.”_

_She gaped and spun around. He was leaning against the tree behind her, wearing an expression more serious than usual. “What is it with you and never appearing_ in front _of people?”_

_He grinned at her, a spark of familiar mischief flashing through his eyes. “It’s more fun this way.” The serious expression returned, along with a troubled furrow in his brow. “I was just checking on your boyfriend. It’s definitely Sam, but not the Sam I assume you’re used to. If I were you, I’d believe him. I, on the other hand, am staying out of this one. You’ve already got help, and their kind don’t mix well with mine. If you call me again, you’d better be on the verge of death.”_

_“Wait!” she said as he raised his fingers in a familiar gesture, but it was too late. He disappeared again; this time she suspected he was not coming back._

At least he’d left her with an apparently never-ending supply of hormones for the road.

She sighed, and leaned back against the bar. Sam was sleeping in their room - he seemed to do little besides sleep ever since the time travelling incident. Planning how to stop an apocalypse took what little energy reserves he had, especially when his father and brother seemed determined to treat him like an infant. She’d heard most of his story about the future, too, and even if she wanted to wrap him up in blankets and never let her out of her sight again, she could acknowledge that he deserved more respect than that.

The demon blood revelation had sparked an unholy screaming match between her and Sam’s father. He’d been given evil powers as a baby and tried to use them to do good in the world, and she wasn’t going to let anyone tell him he was a bad person for trying to make the best of a bad situation. John hadn’t been all too pleased with her for suggesting that using his powers to try to save people was a perfectly reasonable thing to do if one didn’t have all the information, and that maybe Sam would have had more information if John had shared relevant shit with his kids when it directly affected them, instead of treating a twenty-two year old like he was still five. He and Dean hadn’t spoken to her since.

At the moment, though, everyone seemed stymied when it came to how to move forward. Dean was all for going out with his dad to hunt down the yellow-eyed demon, Azazel, and any other demon Sam could tell them about. Sam wanted to save the rest of Azazel’s ‘special children,’ arguing that Azazel was just a cog in a much bigger and older machine. He spent a good deal of time arguing with Lily on how to go about saving the others without just kidnapping them off the street. Jess had no idea what the best course of action would be, but she was pretty sure sitting around arguing all day wasn’t it.

“Is there somewhere I can go for a walk around here?” she asked Ellen as the older woman passed by on her way behind the bar. “I need to clear my head a bit before I lose it.”

Ellen gave her a sympathetic, understanding look. “There’s a trail out back a ways,” she said. “You want any company?” Jess shook her head. “If it were anything less than the apocalypse coming,” Ellen muttered, glaring at where John and Dean sat in a booth across the room, “I’d have kicked you all out by now and been glad for it.”

Jess mentally scratched Ellen off the short list of people who weren’t annoyed by her presence. “Sorry,” she said, for lack of anything else. “Tell Sam I’ll be back later if he wakes before I’m back?”

Without waiting for an answer, Jess slipped off her stool and left towards the back of the bar. She felt Dean’s eyes on her back, but ignored them. Outside, the land looked flat and featureless in all directions. 

There was a stretch of tall grass a ways beyond the parking lot. As Jess approached, she spotted an opening in the grass that wound away in a little dirt path. Patches of grass dotted the path, and in several places she had to force her way through scrubby little bushes, but eventually she decided she was far enough away from the Roadhouse.

“Dear Loki, this is Jessica Moore, and I was hoping to talk to you,” she said, hoping the words would work. Along with her hormones, Jess had found a note in her things when she returned from her excursion nearly two weeks ago. _Dear Giantjess,_ the note had read, _Now that you’re not a tiny little child anymore you should know: that little “spell” you used to summon me is completely meaningless. I can tell when people are calling me even if they aren’t incanting terrible rhymes. Next time you want me, just call my name, and if I’m bored enough I’ll answer._

Several moments passed. A wind blew through the grass around her, rustling gently. Remembering Loki’s penchant for showing up behind her, she rotated continuously in place. Even so, she was still surprised when, on her third rotation, he was just standing there, hands in his pockets and one eyebrow raised.

“You don’t look like you’re on the verge of death.”

“Does death by boredom count?”

To her surprise, Loki barked out a laugh. “Sure, it counts. I personally try to never be bored.” He tilted his head at her and pulled a chocolate bar out of the air. “So, tell me how you’re managing boredom when the end of the world is nigh.” 

Jess hardly needed any more encouragement, and everything she’d been holding in poured out before she could think better of it.

“Well, apparently Sam comes from a family that solves all its problem by killing things, but they can’t decide on what to try and kill first so they’ve been arguing in circles for a week. I’m pretty sure the only reason Sam’s dad hasn’t left in a huff to keep up his loner martyr revenge hunt is because Ellen might shoot him if he abandons Sam while he’s still collapsing every so often with panic attacks from the part of the future he won’t talk about. Dean and Jo both treat me like some pretty little idiot, because obviously Sam is the person who makes dating choices based on boob size, and to top it off we kidnapped two people before we left so a demon won’t use them in his Battle Royal of ‘special’ children.”

Loki finished the candy bar and conjured up a sucker to jam in her mouth before replying. “All that,” he said, words slurred around the candy in his mouth, “and _bored_ is the word you chose?”

“Bored of hearing people argue,” Jess said.

A milkshake was shoved into her hands, and she looked down at it in surprise.

“Now that I can empathize with,” Loki said, sucking on his own milkshake with the sucker in his other hand. “Tell me about what Sam has been willing to talk about.”

The two ended up talking after that for nearly an hour. Loki listened to Jess recount Sam’s stories with an inscrutable look on his face, going through three more candy bars and splitting a few more milk-shakes with Jess when her mouth started going dry; by the end, she may have gained five pounds, but her mind felt lighter than it had all week.


	6. Shadows and Shades

It was strange to be back in the Roadhouse. The place held so many painful memories for Sam. He could hardly look at Ellen and Jo without seeing Ellen cradling Jo’s broken body in one hand and a bomb in the other, telling Sam and Dean to run. He couldn’t look at Ash without remembering the trip to heaven that had convinced Dean that Sam didn’t care about his family just because he also wanted his own life. The past was fraught with more ghosts than a graveyard.

Lily, too, was a ghost. Her decision to join them had surprised Sam, for all that he’d been pushing for it. He was determined to keep her safe, to keep all of Azazel’s victims safe if he could, but he was still lost on the how. His dad wanted to run off and get himself killed by Azazel, and Dean was little better, wanting to at least go back to running around completely unprotected on random hunts that were entirely insignificant in the scheme of things. He couldn’t seem to understand Sam’s reluctance to go on normal hunts, especially when he already ought to know the exact details of five years worth of cases.

The truth, however, was that Sam remembered very few specifics. Oh, sure, he remembered the first time he met Lisa, and he knew that there was a Trickster God running around somewhere who was actually an archangel hiding from his family. He remembered killing a werewolf he’d been starting to fall for, learning that vampires were real, and nearly losing Dean to a fight with a rawhead. There were plenty of memories in his head of hunts long past, for him. What wasn’t in his head anymore were specific dates, exact locations, or the faces of everyone they’d saved and everyone they’d lost. They’d traversed the entire continental US, and after a while towns and cities and people blended into each other, a sprawling patchwork of dingy bars, dirty beds, and small town cops who had no trouble believing the feds were interested in their murders. Beyond that, everything in his past was drenched in the sepia tones of a different life, a life before the cage had broken him a thousand times and remade him anew after every agony. If he tried to go around helping people based on his memories of his old life, he was as likely to get more people killed as to save anyone they’d lost the first time around.

Better to let other hunters deal with the monsters with clean, unbiased minds. If he wasn’t mistaken, there was already someone saving people who hadn’t been there before. Their dad’s journal was proof enough of that.

In the meantime, he had to come up with a plan to stop the apocalypse before it started, without tipping off either heaven or hell to their plans. It was practically the definition of the phrase much easier said than done. He found his mind going in circles over and over all the mistakes he’d made, all the ways he could avoid making the same mistakes without simply making worse ones, and kept coming up short. The other kids Azazel had given his blood too were almost all still alive at this point, and Sam had never been entirely clear on whether or not any of them could have held Lucifer and Sam was simply the first choice, or if they were just distractions meant to force Dean into hell and Sam into his pre-destined role. Without having them all somewhere safe, Sam couldn’t be sure that Lucifer’s half of the apocalypse wouldn’t simply proceed without him.

The angels were even more of a problem. He didn’t remember everything, but he remembered enough of the trouble that Zachariah and Uriel had put him and Dean through. He remembered that Castiel had originally seen him only has the boy with demon blood, the abomination meant to house the devil. They couldn’t rely on Castiel for help. Sam had already ruled out their Cas as the mysterious benefactor who had dealt with the Woman in White and retrieved their dad’s journal.

At this point in time, they didn’t have their anti-possession tattoos for demons or their rib tattoos to hide them from angels. They were sitting ducks as soon as Michael and Azazel realized their plans were headed off the rails.

He didn’t react when the door to his room opened, just keep his gaze tracing the dull brown woodgrain of the ceiling boards as his mind went round in circles.

“Hey, man, you just gonna sleep all day? Dad wants to ask you more questions.” If he strained his peripheral vision, he could just make out Dean in the doorway without moving his head. He felt bad, distantly, for all the crap he was putting his brother through, but he couldn’t bring himself to go back to his old normal for Dean’s sake. He could still remember Dean’s voice, telling Sam he’d given up right before Sam started the apocalypse, could still see the day when Dean dropped his amulet in the trash and told Sam to pick a hemisphere. Dean always came back no matter how much he fucked up, when it would be better if he would just leave. Sam was going to stop the apocalypse, but he couldn’t go back to hunting with his family. He’d proven so many times that he wasn’t meant to be a hunter. Just to not be hunted would be enough for him. Dean would see that eventually.

“Where’s Jess?” Sam asked, when the silence stretched too long. He saw Dean shrug in his periphery.

“How should I know, man? She’s your girlfriend, not mine.”

Sam’s head rolled towards the wall. If he stopped the apocalypse without dying this time, maybe he could finally marry Jess.

Tension stretched like a physical thing between the two men in the room. It was a small room, bare except for a twin bed and an old wooden desk, but Jess’s things scattered around already made it feel as much like home as anywhere ever did to Sam. Low murmurs of conversation filtered through the room from the main bar, but where Sam lay the silence between himself and Dean weighed down upon his chest.

“You know if you don’t talk to dad, he’s gonna be pissed,” Dean said, voice unnaturally loud in the still air. Sam shrugged, still laying down. He couldn’t look at his dad without seeing his body collapsing on the floor outside Dean’s hospital room, or his eyes going yellow with possession just when they thought they’d got away. He loved his dad, for all they disagreed, but he’d gotten over John’s death in a way he hadn’t with anyone else before or since. Everyone expected their parents to die before them. Seeing John Winchester now carried nothing but regret and wrongness.

Everything was wrong, though, in the past. Jess was as he remembered her, but no one else was. Even Sam was not the same person he had been. He just wanted to bury himself in Jess, forget his own differences, and leave the rest of the world to rot.

That last thought, unfortunately, was a lie. Sam sat up, though he still couldn’t meet Dean’s eyes. “Does dad have a new plan that won’t just get us all killed?”

The responding wordless growl was not unexpected. Sam’s lips quirked in what was almost a smile.

“Just get out here so we can talk,” Dean said.

Sam shoved his feet into his shoes and followed Dean out into the sparsely populated bar. Their dad sat in the same booth they had been using all week for their whispered conversations. He scowled as Sam slid into the seat opposite him, but visibly thought through his words before speaking.

“So,” he said, “I’m heading out tomorrow. That Ash kid picked up a few trails that could be Azazel, and we’ve done enough waiting around. I support you and Dean staying here, out of trouble, but I’m not letting the trails go cold.”

Dean protested immediately. “I’ll come with you. If even half the things Sam says are true, you shouldn’t be out there alone. I can help!”

Their dad didn’t even have to glare for Dean to quail under his steady gaze. Sam had forgotten, after their dad’s death, how easily Dean gave in to his orders. The good little soldier had died with their dad, but now he was back.

“You need to look after your brother,” John said. Once, Sam would have bristled at the feeling of being ignored, while his dad and brother discussed him as though he wasn’t right there listening. Now, he couldn’t muster up the energy to disagree. He could feel how tense Dean was next to him, but he just rested his elbows on the table and gave up.

“At least get an anti-possession tattoo, first,” he said, cutting off his dad’s next remarks. Two sets of eyes turned to him, both brows furrowed in confusion. “It’s something Bobby figured out. It’s a symbol you can get tattooed on yourself, and it’ll stop demons from being able to possess you. They can still manage it if the mark gets burned or cut, so it’s a good idea to get it somewhere you can protect easily, but it’s better than nothing.” His dad scowled.

“Why didn’t you tell us this before now?” The accusation in John’s voice rankled, stirring up echoes of Sam’s old anger.

“I’ve been telling you it’s dangerous to go out there, with all of heaven and hell trying to get our family to start the apocalypse. I figured telling you would make you more likely to ignore me.” He was sharper than he meant to be, but even with a hundred years of hell behind him, his dad _still_ knew how to push his buttons when he really put his mind to it. “Since you’ve decided you’re gonna go get yourself killed anyway, I thought I’d at least give you what advantage I could. You’re welcome.”

Dean’s mouth was open in shock, while John’s mouth had thinned into a hard line. He didn’t know why they were still so surprised when he talked back to John. He’d been doing it all his life. Knowing the future and going a little mad from hell memories wasn’t going to be the thing that stopped him.

By evening, Dean had called Bobby and gotten a promise for an email by the next morning with anything he could find on anti-possession tattoos - John had refused to talk to Bobby, though his plan of chewing out Sam instead while Dean made the call had not gone well for either of them. All three Winchesters had ended up in opposite corners of the bar for the evening when Jess finally returned.

“I missed you today,” he said, when she settled in across from him at the back of the bar.

She smiled, reaching out one hand to lace their fingers together. “I just needed to get out and go for a walk,” she said. “There was too much testosterone in this place, and I was going a little stir crazy.”

Sam couldn’t help the smile that stretched across his face in response. “You probably shouldn’t go out alone,” he said with little heat. She’d clearly made it back just fine. She rolled her eyes at him, and he gripped her hand a little tighter but didn’t pursue the topic.

That night, they curled up in each other and lost themselves in the pleasure of each other’s bodies.

—————

John Winchester’s departure coincided neatly with the return of Dean’s confidence. Not a week after John left, Dean refused to stay cooped up in the Roadhouse and began taking longer and longer hunts in an ever-widening radius. The more Dean drew away, the more Sam fell into depression.

Then Jess went on a hunting trip with Jo. It caused an unholy screaming match the next day between Jo and Ellen, but both women came back glowing with pride, and Sam couldn’t find it in himself to be angry with Jess for not telling him before hand. Especially not after she told him about the tattoo parlor they had stopped at first, and showed him the anti-possession tattoo she had gotten. Jo had one as well, she said, and Sam was left to wonder if everyone in his family, whether by blood or by choice, would always end up hunting.

Sam tried to keep Jess in bed with him the next day, but she would not be persuaded. He stepped out of the bedroom sometime after she left to practice her marksmanship with Jo, mind awash with quiet worry. The hunting trip had turned the rocky resentment between Jo and Jess into a solid friendship. 

A casual sweep of the bar revealed little of interest. Ellen stood stiff-backed behind the bar, still clearly unhappy with her daughter slipping behind her back to hunt. Sam knew she would always worry, but also that Jo would make a great hunter, if Sam didn’t get her killed. He doubted it would bring much comfort to Ellen, so he held his tongue. The rest of the bar was as empty as usual, except for the bar. A stocky young woman with dark brown hair sat at the counter. Her back was to Sam, but he would know that profile anywhere.

“Ava?”

The woman spun around so quickly she nearly toppled off her stool.

“Are you Sam?” she asked, fingers twisting nervously in her blouse.

From behind the bar, Ellen was giving Ava’s glass significant looks and shrugging her shoulders. It held a half-inch of water at the bottom; Sam suspected the rest of the holy water was in Ava’s stomach, clearly not causing her any discomfort.

“How are you here?” Sam asked instead of answering. She studied him, and one foot tapped restlessly against the stool.

“I’ve been dreaming about you.” Sam nodded, encouraging her to go on. “There was a… a man, with yellow eyes. He was outside this bar, and he was hurting you.” She looked down and trembled. “I thought I was going crazy, you know. The dreams wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t keep ignoring them. My fiancé said I was being ridiculous, but I had to see if it was real. When I saw the bar, I wondered if maybe I was dreaming again, but now you’re here, and looking real as anything.” She paused, and then whispered low enough Sam had to strain to hear, “Am I crazy?”

Sam unclenched his fists and stepped over to her. “You’re not crazy,” he said. “I’ve had visions too. They only have to come true if we let them, and we’re not going to let them come true.” Ava folded into his arms with a stifled sob.

For all that Dean liked to tease Sam about how much he cared about people, he still didn’t really know what to do with Ava except awkwardly pat her back. Luckily for him, she seemed to appreciate it. “I’ve got snot all over your shirt, I’m sorry,” she said, leaning back with an ugly sniffle. He smiled.

“It’s ok. We _will_ make sure what you saw doesn’t happen.”

The smile she returned was watery and fragile, but at least she smiled. Sam would take that win. “I can introduce you to some others like us, too, if you’d like,” he said.

“Lily and Katie are out with Jess and my daughter,” Ellen said from behind the bar. Sam looked at her in surprise, but she merely shrugged, still stiff and unwilling to say more.

Ava joined the girls, and Sam went back to bed as soon as he could escape Ava’s watching gaze. 

Everything was happening too quickly and not quickly enough. His dad or Dean was going to die and break the first seal because they wouldn’t just stay safe, and then Sam would be used like a puppet again to break the final one. The inevitability of it pressed down on him like a physical thing, the future and his past circling around each other in an endless ouroboros, Lucifer driving both his future and his past. For all he knew, this wasn’t even real. Maybe Michael and Lucifer had discovered a new way to break his mind, to give him everything he wanted, his brother and father and Jess all alive, the chance to save the kids he’d been meant to kill, Jo and Ellen living in the Roadhouse with Ash, and he was meant to watch it all be ripped away again, nothing he could do to stop the combined might of Heaven and Hell when Lucifer called the shots in his own domain. 

He couldn’t take everyone he loved and lock them away. 

He wished so badly that he could, but then he would be no better than the angels, trying to arrange everyone’s lives to suit his own plans with no regard for free will. No better than the demons, who only wanted to watch the world burn.

Two more weeks passed, while Sam sank further into depression. Jess hung out with Jo, with Lily and Katie and Ava more and more. She went on long walks alone, and saw Sam less and less. Dean hunted in ever increasing circles, and Sam felt time slipping like sand through his fingers. He was frozen. He could tell that anxiety and depression were stymying any attempts at progress, but he couldn’t claw away the molasses gumming up the gears of his mind long enough to _do_ anything.

As the days passed, his certainty that he hadn’t even made it out of hell grew. If that were the case, there would be no point in doing anything. Anything he did was doomed before he even began, so why should he try?


End file.
